NEWS ALERT: Media Gets Some Stuff Right About Independent Voters!

The Massachusetts special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat continues to reverberate (or is that ricochet?) in the media [for a quick round-up of latest Charlie Cook in National Journal, Robert Reich on Huffington Post, Dan Balz in Washington Post and Kristi Keck on CNN, see today’s Hankster] and independent voters remain center stage (the newly elected Senator is that guy who posed nude for Cosmo, right?…) To wit:

Howard Fineman gets it right with one of the most grounded descriptions of independents in print in Independent Minded (Newsweek).

Also of note, Elizabeth Benjamin, who took Ben’s place at the Daily News when Mr. Smith went to Washington with Politico, gets it right in Bloomberg’s Independence (Pay)Day by making the first ever in print distinction between the grassroots NYC Independence Party Organizations and the Upstate-Anything-But-Independent-“We’re proud to be the party of business”-MacKay crowd.

And then there’s Thomas Friedman’s critique of Obama’s first year where Friedman laments the disappearance of the President’s “amazing, young, Internet-enabled, grass-roots movement he mobilized to get elected”. Mr. Friedman apparently misses the distinction between running for office and governing the country, but hey, 2 outa 3 ain’t bad!

Oh, and be sure to follow the dialog about what exactly the Tea Party movement is and where it came from, latest by Ben McGrath in The New Yorker.